


the island of my head

by solitaryrefinement (whatsarasays)



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Airports, All the Warnings That Come with Richard as a Person, Between Seasons/Series, Internal Conflict, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Self-Imposed R-Slur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26914564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsarasays/pseuds/solitaryrefinement
Summary: Richard was already sleep-deprived when they departed from San Jose International for this conference. And then the gate agent announced that the last leg of their itinerary was delayed.So, of course it's now that Jared decides to ask, “'Do you find you have a rich, complex inner life?’”
Relationships: Jared Dunn/Richard Hendricks
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	the island of my head

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The National's You Had Your Soul With You.

The airport isn’t loud, per se. It’s late, so most of the vendors are closed. Those zippy golf carts aren’t honking around. The TVs flanking the gate corral have their volume off and their subtitles on. There’s just this deafening echo. A static comprised of the swirl of roller suitcase wheels and the rhythmic padding of footsteps bouncing off the tile floors and bloating the terminal’s vaulted ceiling.

An hour ago, the gate agent announced that their itinerary's last leg, a Delta redeye from Chicago to Toronto, was delayed. Richard has felt Jared monitoring him ever since. Jared knows how he gets during travel. Lights are too bright, smells are too pungent, clothes are too restricting, conversations are too taxing, and sounds? Un-fucking-bearable.

Noise-canceling headphones are Richard’s usual remedy. He just slaps those puppies on and recedes into himself. Problem solved. But he accidentally packed those in his checked luggage. His solution is to pull up his sweatshirt hood and wear his crescent travel pillow over his head (and therefore ears) like a halo. Like he’s the patron saint of jetlag himself—dehydrated, swollen, and stale. He looks ridiculous, and he knows that, but whatever.

Closing his eyes, he slumps into the vinyl seat and tries to block out the world.

Then Jared, who hasn’t said a peep since the delay was announced, leans in and whispers a cautious question, “'Do you find you have a rich, complex inner life?’”

Convinced he misheard, Richard scoots the neck wrap off one ear with a forefinger, “What?”

Jared holds up his phone, the screen displaying some sort of inventory, “I marked ‘yes,’ because I can’t imagine anyone of your intellectual caliber having anything less, but I don’t want to assume. Also,” he flips the screen back toward himself to read, “‘are you sensitive to pain’ and ‘do you get frazzled easily when you have a lot to do in a short amount of time?’”

“Are you trying to diagnose me with a personality disorder?”

“It’s an assessment for sensory-processing sensitivity. I took the liberty of filling out the questions I thought I knew for you, but again, I’m double-checking a few of the answers. And it’s a trait, not a disorder. Useful information for optimizing output, as well as for general self-awareness.”

“Oh, no, great. Just what I wanted,” Richard clips as he gestures out into nothing, “to be a part of another—fucking—abnormal demographic. Thanks, Jared.”

“You might have a heightened central nervous system, but it’s estimated that 15-20% of the population has it in some form, so you’d be in wonderful company. A more positive spin would be to consider yourself a rare and aware soul,” Jared explains with a little shrug, “It comes with its challenges, but it also means you uniquely see the world. You’re akin to people like Yukio Mishima or Wendell Berry. It’s beautiful.”

“Stop. There’s no way either of those guys has—er, _had_ —sensory-processing sensitivity. And I say ‘had’ because Mishima committed seppuku.”

“Oh. …that’s unfortunate. But I’m not saying they did, Richard, what I mean is that they were in-tune with things others weren’t and so were able to offer a fresh perspective. Like you do.”

The airport intercom crackles to life with a sudden, high-pitched note, and the announcer pages for a late passenger on another flight. The sound scrapes against Richard’s raw nerves, and it feels like someone is taking a cheese grater to his skull. He just can’t deal with Jared’s unquenchable optimism and misplaced compliments amidst the cacophony exploding around him.

“Sure,” he huffs.

After slipping the travel pillow back over his head, he crosses his arms and lets his head thump back against the seat.

* * *

This is how Richard arrived: stuck in his own head. ‘Huston to Major Tom,’ his uncle would jibe during Christmas visits, interrupting Richard’s wall-staring with a wave. It was meant as a harmless joke. Like his stepmom calling him ‘special.’ Such adjectives were tossed his way under the guise of affable ribbing his whole life, and while he may not have the social acumen of Dear Abby, he’s well aware of what they actually mean.

_‘Hi, this is Richard Hendricks. I’m a total fucking retard.’_

He gets it. He really does.

He’s not a good person.

Not in the _moral_ sense (although that’s its own ever-growing issue), but in the _being human_ sense _._ Something got switched somewhere. He was meant to be a different lifeform. Something small and scruffy that’s good at puzzle-solving but has limited emotional understanding.

Once upon a time, he thought the Valley might be the place for things like him. ‘Give us your anxious, your detached masses yearning to be something, the wretched refuse of basement bedrooms.’ Liars. Yeah, sure, he met a few other pathetic assholes like himself and has a slim chance of doing what he wants with his life, but it’s not like this stupid industry ever really gave him anything apart from an impending stroke and point-filed teeth. Made him more of the creature that causes all his problems. The one that’s lopsided and fidgety.

At least now he’s sharp and ready to take off some fingers.

* * *

Richard was already sleep-deprived when they departed from San Jose International for the conference. His eyes remind him of this as they sing for moisture. Smearing his hand across his face, he tries to rub the tears out. No dice. After a spastic series of harsh lid scrunchings, his tear ducts finally kick into gear and give him some relief. Jared probably has eye drops, but he doesn’t want to ask.

Glancing up to the gate desk, the monitor still reads ‘delayed.’ And under that, ‘1:17 am.’ Not an ungodly hour for him, but stacked with the meager amount of sleep he’s gotten over the past few days, it feels outrageous. Offensive, even.

Beside him, Jared radiates his usual contained pleasantness, content inside the copy of _Scientific American_ he purchased from a news kiosk. He explained that it’s his airport ritual and that simple pleasures should never be discounted, that he strives to make a whole existence thriving off the little things. Every now and then, his smartwatch interrupts his reading with a notification, and he pulls out his phone to reply, putting out another fire for which he'll never be thanked.

Richard hoists himself out of the depths of his misery long enough to watch Jared, noting the curl escaping from his hair gel and the dark circles forming in the wells of his eye sockets. To him, Jared always seemed a bit, well, skeletal. Haunted. In more ways than one. But the guy has his moments. (Not that Richard takes particular notice of those moments). Between the disintegrating coif and sinking under eyes, he’s reminded of TechCrunch and the hundreds of other sleepless evenings they’ve spent together. In fact, he can’t remember the last time he pulled an all-nighter without him. Whether Jared’s curled up on the floor or offering Richard paleo granola bars, he’s always there. Loyal to the core, even in the face of Richard's uncountable eccentricities.

Jared’s eyes flick up to his, having sensed the lingering glance, and Richard retreats to studying Jared’s shoulder.

“How are you holding up?” Jared asks as he folds his magazine and uncrosses his legs.

Richard doesn’t move the pillow from his ears this time. That way, there’s a barrier, a distance made from cotton and stuffing. “Fine.” His voice reverberates in his head.

“Okay. I think I’m going to get tea. Would you like anything?”

“No, I’m good.”

* * *

Each person’s existence is their own. No one knows every part of you. No one gets the whole picture. Not really. You think your friends and family love you for who you are? Nope. They just love you for who they _think_ you are, and who they think you are is a combination of your visible parts and their (sometimes narrow or incorrect) interpretations of those parts. It’s incomplete.

So, even if Richard weren’t a slipped disc of a person, altogether misshapen and out of place, it wouldn’t matter. Okay, yes, some people are more alike than others and have an easier time swimming in society's flow. But everyone’s in the same sea of interpersonal isolation. Stuck in the paradox.

He tries not to think about it. Or, if he does, it’s only from an abstract point-of-view. This is philosophy, an intellectual discipline. He can just regurgitate some Irvin D. Yalom and avoid letting this wash over himself in any real sense. Because this is the kind of stuff that twists him up, and God forbid he gets caught in it, and it becomes a bobbing, blinking, brightly colored merry-go-round, and he must rush to the medicine cabinet before acid reflux burns him right up from the inside.

‘Ah, psychosomatic issues,’ he can almost hear his doctor saying. He adds that to the running list of everything wrong with him before concluding he shouldn’t think too much about that either.

* * *

When Jared returns with two cups of green tea, one of them made to Richard’s liking (honey and an ice chip to cool it to a drinkable temperature), and a packet of ibuprofen, acid crawls up Richard’s throat in a searing burp and carnival music begins to toot somewhere in the back of his head. It’s just Lipton, hot water, and Styrofoam, and Jared does stuff like this for him all the time, but right now? With the exhaustion and the burnout and his racing thoughts? It’s too much. Way too much.

After he knocks back the Advil, he takes the cup with unsteady hands and manages not to spill its contents.

But because he’s never been neat, never been able to keep his insides from lopping over the rim of his outsides, it burbles up and out in a sudden blurt: “Do you think we’re alone?”

Jared swivels in his seat, baffled round eyes bouncing from the other travelers sitting at the gate to the uniformed airline employees to the night janitor changing the garbage lining by the bathrooms, “No, I do not…?”

“Not what I meant," Richard backtracks before they can get into it because he doesn’t want this discussion. He does not. There aren’t any antacids within reach. “It’s-, it’s fine. Stupid question.”

“Do you mean in the universe?” Jared tries for him. “Many scientists find extraterrestrial life to be plausible. I myself have doubts, but who’s to say?”

“What? Jared, no. No. I’m not talking about aliens,” he says before sentencing the subject to death with a slice of his palm, “Just. Forget it.”

“If you insist,” Jared nods gingerly. After a beat, he takes a sip of tea, but concern continues to sit gently on his face in the shape of a small, m-shaped frown.

Richard goes for his phone, deciding to check his email if only for a distraction from whatever the hell this has turned into, when he sees a large, pale hand grip the elbow rest they’re sharing and looks up to find Jared pinning him with an over-earnest stare. “Richard,” he says, “even if we are existentially alone, I don’t think that discounts the moments of connection we do find. In fact, I think it makes them all the sweeter.”

Fangs.

Carousels.

Acid.

Those are the only thoughts Richard can conjure. This is why he doesn’t want this. Jared causes internal system errors, ones he doesn’t know how to troubleshoot.

“Uh. Okay. Cool,” he says.

And then focuses every ounce of his attention on holding his tea upright.

* * *

When Richard wakes, everything feels slow and soupy. Shifting, he realizes he managed to origami every inch of himself into his chair in his sleep, as well as claim Jared’s bony shoulder a pillow (which he has also drooled on). His travel pillow lies abandoned on the floor next to his carry-on and empty teacup. 

The overhead screen informs him in bold red letters that their flight has finally been canceled.

But he doesn’t move, instead letting his cheek marinate in fleece and saliva as he listens to Jared book last-minute hotel reservations,

“Would you mind placing us in your quietest rooms? They’re all about the same? I see. Perhaps it’s possible to book the rooms on either side as well? Yes. I understand. Rate is a non-issue. Wonderful, let’s do that! Thank you so much. You have a lovely evening.”

After Jared ends the call, he folds his hands in his lap and—careful not to disturb Richard—heaves a sigh.

Richard allows his head to rise with the intake and fall on the exhale.

He doesn’t let himself think about it.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I might have gotten the ice chip in the tea from some other fic, but if I did, I cannot for the life of me remember which one.


End file.
